Go Forth And Suck (Ryan Reynolds + Wrexham Wisdom)

jet fuel and grace - they can go a long way

Author

Matt Zeigler
June 09, 2025

“Humiliation is the jet fuel I subsist on” - Ryan Reynolds

That’s a lot. It’s a bold statement. But only because there’s some truth in it.

Jet fuel gets converted into energy, which results in propulsion. It also can blow you up if it’s not focused. That sounds a lot like failure, humiliation, and risk-taking to me.

There’s something special about how Roger Bennett winds Ryan Reynolds up. This exchange on a recent Men In Blazers had to be transcribed and set aside. They’re talking about the Wrexham season, but they’re also talking about life:

Ryan Reynolds: Perfectionism is a f***ing disease. People are so tied up, or worried about sucking, that nobody wants to try anything new. I even see it with my own kids. I tell them, “Go suck at something! Everyone that you know, that you love - as an artist, or a sports person - sucked at one point. And, that’s just the way it is. Go suck at something.”

Roger Bennett: Just point at words, because I’m hearing my mother’s voice, “Michelangelo, you know HE didn’t finish things!” So, just finish that point - “Sucking is good because…” “Failing is good because…”

Ryan Reynolds: You cannot be good at anything unless you’re willing to be bad at it. That’s just a fact, you have to embrace that. Showing up at Wrexham, we embraced the fact that this might backfire, that people might look at us with suspicion - and they did. But time also fixes that. But we were OK with sucking. We were OK with being patient. We were alright with experimenting and trying different things and feeling it out, and that’s easy for us to say because it’s not going to completely ruin our lives if it doens’t work, but the town? It meant so much to them that suddenly, we’re as hooked and as in - so, you have to start to listen to your mistakes.

Perfection is a disease.

You can’t be good unless you’re willing to be bad.

No one is immune from these truths.

We have to bottle something up. Humiliation. Failure(s).

We have use what we’ve bottled up to propel us through failure, and that introduces a whole other layer of risk that we’ll have to choose to accept (or reject).

What Ryan Reynolds is doing here, for himself, and his partners, and the broader community of Wrexham is worth unpacking. This philosophy plays out differently for everyone, at different scales. I saw it at work in a conversation with a reader just this week about his Personal Archive

This friend told me about how he’s keeping his version of a Personal Archive in a private folder. It’s there, for his reference, but not for public consumption. Almost like a diary as opposed to a public resource, and I told him I love that he’s just doing it.

I told him I think it’s great because he’s leaning into the risk, the focus, the attention required to put stuff down. That’s the process. The commitment to the reality of completing a thought and having it stare back at you on your computer screen/written page/iPhone notes.

No entry is perfect. Not every entry gets better than a prior one. It’s all a process.

And you are either working towards a future with a stronger muscle for these experiments or not.

You can do it in private. You can do it without fandom. You can do it in private but have it only focused on your immediate family. There are layers. Layers like what Ryan describes in that post, on how he thinks of failure at the personal level, with his kids, and then at Wrexham FC.

Just know that if you do put yourself out there, if you do share things in public, you might find out what Ryan and Rob found out with Wrexham: if you can risk humiliating yourself while protecting those your work is also lifting up, it’s a very big deal, and it requires the highest amount of integrity imaginable.

Know why you’re doing it. Give yourself the grace to suck. And then, never forget who the passengers are, the ones that your jet fuel is carrying too.

It starts with us and harnessing the power of failure. Then we can prove it to others (like Ryan with his business partners, or me with my friend). It can change our lives if we start to prove it to a community too (whether that’s in advancing a football club, or sharing our thoughts in public).

Go forth and suck.

Success is waiting.